Streaming Game Footage on Ustream

After my comparison of the two prime game streaming services, you may be interested in streaming game footage with Ustream‘s higher quality broadcast potential. Unfortunately the service wasn’t made with streaming on-screen action in mind, so it takes a variety of third party applications in order to get things working properly. It’s not an easy process, so I’ve written this guide to help you along.

There are a few things you need to keep in mind before I begin. For starters, a requirement for this setup is a quad core processor. That’s not a recommendation, it is a requirement! If all you have is a dual core setup then you might as well head on over to Livestream. Secondly, if your sound card doesn’t have a working sound mixer function then this setup may cost a small sum of money. That is, if you want to have in-game sound recorded along with your microphone input. I also assume that you already have a Ustream account.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at the software we’ll be needing and the setup process!

The very first thing you’ll want to download is a webcam simulator tool that records on-screen action. These tools function much like a regular webcam, but they record the action on your screen instead of the webcam input. There are two popular options here, namely the decent quality ManyCam and the higher quality VH Screen Capture Driver. ManyCam doesn’t record in quite the same quality, but VH Screen Capture carries a watermark in the bottom of all output, so choose whichever you prefer.

Before getting to work on the webcam simulator, you’ll also need Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder which is a free download from Adobe. This is the tool that will grab your webcam simulator and audio output and send it on to your Ustream channel. It’s an alternative for Ustream’s own Ustream Producer tool, which curiously doesn’t allow for high quality broadcasting nor Stereo Mix audio input, so it’s useless for game streaming.

Lastly, an audio tool may be required depending on whether you have Stereo Mix functionality or not. This is only a required step if you want to record in-game/skype/teamspeak/ventrilo sound along with your microphone input, which is almost certainly the case. And seeing as getting the sound sorted is the most tiresome part of setting up a Ustream live game stream, we’ll start with getting that sorted.

getting the sound sorted is the most tiresome part of setting up a Ustream live game stream

Game sound on Ustream

In order to check for Stereo Mix functionality, you right click on the speaker icon in the bottom right and select recording devices. Alternatively, head to the control panel and open Sound settings and head to recording devices. Windows Vista and 7 users will need to right click here and display all disabled devices just in case. If “What u hear” or “Stereo Mix” are present then you likely have a functional Stereo Mix option, now just right click on it and enable it.

If you have Stereo Mix then you’ll also need to head on to the playback sound settings and un-mute your microphone, after that the audio part should be done. If you can’t even find your microphone in playback settings (like me) then you might as well disable Stereo Mix and head on to my alternative solution below, because it’s not going to work.

Game sound on Ustream alternative

This is the solution I stumbled upon after many hours of experimentation – and it requires the Virtual Audio Cable application which costs 29 euro. Download the trial version first, so that you can check that my solution works for you. The reason for the need to upgrade to the full version is that the trial version blasts “trial” through your audio output every minute or so, which gets very annoying. There may be alternative applications, but I haven’t been able to find them.

After installing Virtual Audio Cable, you’ll need to start its Control Panel application in administrator mode. Set up two virtual audio cables on the left hand side and on the right hand side increase the NC max value to your amount of speakers (2, 4, 5, 6, etc.) in order to have stereo/surround sound. Press Set on both ends, then Restart and Exit the application.

Now go back to your sound settings (right click sound icon in taskbar or head to control panel -> sound) and under Playback Devices select Line 2 as your primary playback device. You will lose all sound temporarily, but we’ll fix that soon. If the following setup doesn’t work for you then you can restore audio afterwards by selecting your Speakers as the primary playback device and uninstalling Virtual Audio Cable for good measure.

Now Virtual Audio Cable also has two separate audio repeater applications. Start up a kernel audio repeater and set input to Virtual Cable 2 and output to Realtek HD Audio Output (or your audio output device), this will restore your sound. Next start up a regular audio repeater and set input to Microphone and output to Line 1. Finally, start another regular audio repeater and set input to Line 2 and output to Line 1. Make sure to start each of these repeaters and your sound should be set up.

To check whether your sound setup is working you can open playback devices settings to monitor the audio levels of Line 1 and Line 2. Line 1 will be your primary audio line on which microphone and PC audio converge. Start up your music playback application (winamp/windows media player/whatever) and listen to a song while talking in your microphone. If the sound bar of Line 1 is responding to both forms of audio input then your setup is good, otherwise it’s not going to work.

Next we're going to set about actually capturing this - the video footage

Capturing on-screen action

Hopefully you’ve survived the tricky part and we can be on to actually capturing the video footage. Start up VH Screen Capture and in the Capture tab change the resolution to your native gaming resolution and set the left-hand values to 0, then set it to track screen. In the Settings tab you’ll want to set Frame rate to 60 and keep the rest default.

In ManyCam it’s even easier, because you’ll just need to fire it up and set the resolution to max.

Setting up the Ustream broadcast

First go to your Ustream account on the Ustream website and in the advanced tab of your show settings you have to download the Flash Media Encoder XML File. This is required in order to get Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder to send your streaming media to your Ustream channel.

Now make sure that VH Screen Capture or ManyCam is already running and then fire up FMLE. Go to the File menu and choose Open Profile. Then find the XML file you downloaded, which when used should fill in the details on the right side under Stream to Flash Media server. With that taken care off, you can set up the FMLE output settings.

Set Device to VH Screen Capture or ManyCam, then select the H264 format with Main, 3 seconds and 3.1 settings. Next set the FPS to 25. Input Size should be your native resolution (1920×1080 in my case) and under bitrate set the resolution to 800×450 with an optionally higher bitrate. Higher bitrates require a better internet connection, but are also the primary benefit of using Ustream over Livestream. Don’t go overboard, 600-700 or so is excellent.

Under Audio you want to set Device to Stereo Mix or Line 1 (Virtual Audio Cable) which will ensure that all your audio will be forwarded to the stream. Set up the format and channels accordingly.

Stream on. Game on. You're good to go!

Start Streaming

Now that everything is good to go, you can press Start. Then head on over to Ustream and select Broadcast Now. The broadcaster window will pop up and automatically start broadcasting your stream. Audio and Video fields will be blank, because it will be working off of Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder.

Now you can fire up your game and have fun streaming. If you’re running into performance issues with your quad core, then  you can set FMU to CPUs 2 and 3, with the game taking CPUs 0 and 1. This is done by opening task manager (ctrl + alt + delete – task manager) and right clicking on the appropriate process and setting processor affinity. For FMLE that’s the FlashMediaLiveEncoder process. If you’re the owner of a more recent quad core proccesor then this shouldn’t be necessary.

Keep in mind that you’ll need to be running all of these applications (Audio Repeaters, VH Screen Capture/ManyCam and Adobe Flash Media Live Encoder) every time you intend to stream. Now get out there and stream some gaming action!

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